Who am I and should you listen to me?

Hi, I'm Dave or Worm That Turned. I've been on Arbcom for the past 2 years and think I've done an all right job. Incoming arbitrators will find a much more pleasant place to work than I found in my early days and I like to think that I played a part in that.

In my opinion, the most important thing you need to be a good Arbitrator is the ability to form your own opinion and articulate that opinion. The abilities to be able to change your mind and patiently read evidence are also nice to have. Now, most people think they can do this and probably can - so what I really worry about in my guide and in my voting is how you'll cope with being on Arbcom. It's not a nice place to be.

My guide is based on my own opinion - the impression I've been given of the candidates when interacting with them or not. I will not be supporting more than 9 candidates, though I will only oppose those who I do not believe are suitable for Arbcom. I will explain my reasoning, you can take it into account if you like. Update: Turns out there are 10 candidates I believe are good enough to support alongside a few neutrals. I've narrowed it down to 9 for my personal vote, but I will leave it for the reader to make that decision.

Administrators on Arbcom - I've no objection to non-admins on Arbcom, in fact I'd love to see a non-admin on Arbcom, I think they'd bring an excellent perspective. I judge each individual on their merits, and whether or not they hold an admin flag will not factor into my decision making.

Thoughts on Arbcom

Arbcom plays an essential role on Wikipedia, but there's little it does that could not be done by someone else. I'm hoping that its different roles will be spun off into the community over the coming years and will support any efforts to do so. As I see it, the roles that Arbcom do are as follows

Arbcom is the final area for dispute resolution. There are sometimes disputes which the community is not able to make a decision on. Arbcom is also not qualified to make a decision, but a decision needs to be made. The community is getting better and better at this, so cases are less frequent.
Arbcom is the only place which is currently able to actively remove the sysop flag. The committee should be therefore prepared to do so. I would like to see the community take on this role.
Arbcom is responsible for the functionaries. This includes the Audit Subcommittee, where functionaries' activities can be reviewed. This also includes the appointment of new functionaries. I would like to see this responsibility be moved to the functionaries as a group, perhaps by empowering the Audit Subcommittee.
Arbcom is the final option for Ban Appeals. It is important that there is a group who can look at bans (or long term blocks) and make decisions on them. The Administrator's noticeboards are frequented by people who are not able to make objective decisions, sometime private information is involved. That said, there is no reason this needs to be an Arbcom role, and I would like to see it spun off to the community.
Arbcom is responsible for anything else the community is not able to handle. This is generally privacy related information. Once the above are tackled - the "everything else" group should be reconsidered. I'd rather it was split between the WMF and the functionaries.

Arbcom shouldn't exist as it does. Hopefully we'll get to a position where it doesn't over the next few years.

Candidates

I've blanked the candidate table - I see no reason to keep information such as that permanently visible. It is available in the page history.